The often troubled, multi-million dollar Liberalville Working Farm and Family Zoo celebrated its second anniversary yesterday by closing the Farm and giving all employees the day off.
Liberalville officials accepted the donation of the Working Farm on the condition officials preserve it as an homage to working farmers. “The Field,” as locals refer to it now, morphed into a hybrid zoo/farm after local activists argued the animal selection – horses, cows, pigs, sheep – omitted animals uniquely representative of Africa and was not sufficiently diverse. The Working Farm Committee acquiesced to the protestors and announced, with much fanfare, planned zoo exhibits to include lions, tigers, and an African crocodile. This led to protests by underrepresented Latinos. Then local vegans successfully lobbied for ordinances banning all carnivorous animals from the Working Farm. The Working Farm board responded by limiting the zoo exhibits to an African tortoise and a Central American sloth, choices some local community organizers called retribution.
The “Working Farm” moniker was next to go. Animal rights activists protested that workers were exploiting the animals by harnessing them and forcing them to perform work activities, such as plowing the cornfield or pulling wagons of tourists through the wooded area separating the farm and zoo exhibits. They gained representation rights of the animals and concessions that prohibited animals from performing any work functions. Human, immigrant “guest workers” now pull the wagons.
Eliminating the historic functions of a working farm put vital funding at risk. Faced with the loss of Historic Land Preservation Tax Credits from the Department of Agriculture, Committee members cleverly pivoted and applied for NASA grants by rebranding the Field as a “Farm of the Future.” Tourists arriving at the Field are now greeted by a life-sized cutout of then US Vice President Joe Biden. Below his cutout is his famous June 2012 high school commencement speech quote imploring students to “imagine a world where hunger no longer exists because crops grow without the need of soil, water or fertilizer.” (In fairness to Biden, he may have been referring to Tangs®.) In fact, no crops are grown at the Field, and the cornfield has become known as the “Weed Field.” Fortunately, the unworked farmland does qualify for Department of Agriculture set-aside grants paid to farmers for not growing crops.
After abandoning the corn crop, management reassigned the Weed Field to free-range chickens. Unfortunately, free-range chickens are known to eat their feces and many incurred illnesses. An ethical dilemma emerged when the chickens started to get eaten by a free-range, Endangered Species Act-protected coyote. The Farm is a gun-free zone, preventing officials from shooting the coyote. Luckily, the coyote died from eating too many diseased free-range chickens. The remaining chickens froze to death over the winter when the predicted temperature spike from global warming did not occur.
Although the chickens eventually died off, new plants emerged the next spring from the uneaten tropical wild bird food distributed for the chickens. One of these plants was cannabis, commonly known as marijuana. Workers could not control the cannabis outbreak with pesticides due to organic-only mandates and bans on all products from Koch Industries or Monsanto. They eventually had to advertise to the Liberalville community for volunteers to hand-pull the cannabis weeds from the Weed Field. The volunteer community responded with gusto.
As of press time, officials are still searching for the free-range tortoise and sloth, each suspected of escaping the premises.
